On the menu today: Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar needed to start a war with Israel like he needed another hole in the head, and in the end, he got both.
The editors of National Review declare the arrival of long-delayed justice in Gaza; as our Jeff Blehar put it, “A just world required this man to die, and ideally without dignity.” And our Noah Rothman concludes, “The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved.”
But to close out the week, today’s newsletter will look at a trend getting crowded out of the headlines by the presidential race and Middle East news: the sudden announcement of multiple plans to restart shuttered nuclear plants. And it’s largely being driven by . . . big tech companies, with some cheerleading from Democratic governors. What if the conservatives won the argument about nuclear power, and no one noticed?
Flipping the Switch on Nuclear
Did you notice that suddenly everything’s coming up nuclear?
It seemed like just ten minutes ago, Jane Fonda made a scary movie about nuclear power plants back in the 1970s and thus America didn’t dare build any new nuclear power plants. They were the stuff of grim jokes — enormously dangerous time bombs operated by the Homer Simpsons of the world. (For 35 years, Americans have watched the bumbling animated resident of Springfield obliviously tossing around a glowing green rod of uranium in the opening credits of The Simpsons.)
The March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island accident had seemingly permanently demonized nuclear-energy production. Conservatives joked that Ted Kennedy’s car killed more people than the accident at the Pennsylvania nuclear plant, and for a long time that appeared to be true, but in 2017, Penn State College of Medicine researchers made the case for a possible correlation between the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station and 44 cases of thyroid cancer between 1974 and 2014.
After Three Mile Island, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn’t issue a permit for new construction of a nuclear plant until 2012. There are about 440 nuclear-power reactors in the world today; but most people can name only the three that had serious accidents: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. (If a fourth one ever becomes a household name, it will probably be the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, currently occupied by Russian forces and not managed terribly carefully.)
For decades, conservatives in the U.S. and abroad argued until they were blue in the face that nuclear power was overwhelmingly safe, reliable, and cost-effective, and the issue of where to put the spent fuel was manageable. If you cared about reducing carbon emissions, you had to include nuclear power as part of the energy equation. There just wasn’t any way to build enough windmills or solar panels to meet America’s energy demands. It was Sisyphean work, but public opinion slowly started to shift in favor of more nuclear power.
And then, some of America’s biggest tech companies concluded they needed a lot more energy to run their data centers in the decades to come, and they decided that restarting decommissioned nuclear plants was the best, most cost-effective, and most reliable option. And with the seeming snap of their fingers, a slew of those closed plants are now scheduled to start operating again in the coming years.
One of [Three Mile Island’s] reactors, Unit 2, suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 in what remains the most significant nuclear accident in US history. It has been shuttered ever since.
But the site, in Pennsylvania, is also home to another reactor—Unit 1, which consistently and safely generated electricity for decades until it was shut down in 2019. The site’s owner announced last week that it has plans to reopen the plant and signed a deal with Microsoft. The company will purchase the plant’s entire electric generating capacity over the next 20 years.
Amazon is developing “Small Modular Reactors” in places across the country:
[Amazon Web Services] announced it has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy, Virginia’s utility company, to explore the development of a small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, near Dominion’s existing North Anna nuclear power station. Nuclear reactors produce no carbon emissions. . . .
“We see the need for gigawatts of power in the coming years, and there’s not going to be enough wind and solar projects to be able to meet the needs, and so nuclear is a great opportunity,” said Matthew Garman, CEO of AWS. “Also, the technology is really advancing to a place with SMRs where there’s going to be a new technology that’s going to be safe and that’s going to be easy to manufacture in a much smaller form.”
Virginia is home to nearly half of all the data centers in the U.S., with one area in northern Virginia dubbed Data Center Alley, the bulk of which is in Loudon County. An estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic travels through Data Center Alley each day.
Google said Monday that it will purchase power from small modular reactor developer Kairos Power, as tech companies increasingly turn to nuclear power as a way to fulfill the growing energy demands from data centers. . . .
Kairos Power, which is backed by the Department of Energy, was founded in 2016. In July, the company began construction on its Hermes Low-Power Demonstration Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Rather than use water as the reactor coolant — as is used in traditional nuclear reactors — Kairos Power uses molten fluoride salt.
Google said the first reactor will be online by 2030, with more reactors going live through 2035. In total, 500 megawatts will be added to the grid. That’s much smaller than commercial reactors — Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle, which came online this year, is 1.1 gigawatts, for example — but there’s a lot of momentum behind SMRs. Advocates point to lower costs, faster completion times, and location flexibility.
The Energy Department said on Monday that it had finalized a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to help a company restart a shuttered nuclear plant in Michigan — the latest sign of rising government support for nuclear power
Two rural electricity providers that planned to buy power from the reactor would also receive $1.3 billion in federal grants under a program approved by Congress to help rural communities tackle climate change.
The moves will help Holtec International reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in Covert Township, Mich., which ceased operating in 2022. The company plans to inspect and refurbish the plant’s reactor and seek regulatory approval to restart the plant by October 2025. . . .
Holtec acquired the Palisades nuclear plant in 2022, with plans to dismantle it, but later campaigned to reopen the plant with the backing of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat.
And there’s early talk about restarting a nuclear power plant in Iowa:
NextEra Energy, the Florida company that owns the 600-megawatt Duane Arnold Nuclear Center, said this week it “may consider resuming operations” at the plant near Palo — Iowa’s only nuclear power station — as it looks at “future energy demands.”
“There are no formal plans to do so at this time,” NextEra spokesperson Bill Orlove said in an email. But he added, “We are evaluating this opportunity.”
That might be the extent of decommissioned plants in the U.S. that can be brought back online: “Some were closed because of damage, such as San Onofre in California or Crystal River, in Florida. Others are already being dismantled, including Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, near New York City.” But there are also efforts to build new reactors, and you might be surprised to see who’s backing one of the early initiatives:
Outside a small coal town in southwest Wyoming, a multibillion-dollar effort to build the first in a new generation of American nuclear power plants is underway.
Workers began construction on Tuesday on a novel type of nuclear reactor meant to be smaller and cheaper than the hulking reactors of old and designed to produce electricity without the carbon dioxide that is rapidly heating the planet.
The reactor being built by TerraPower, a start-up, won’t be finished until 2030 at the earliest and faces daunting obstacles. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission hasn’t yet approved the design, and the company will have to overcome the inevitable delays and cost overruns that have doomed countless nuclear projects before.
What TerraPower does have, however, is an influential and deep-pocketed founder. Bill Gates, currently ranked as the seventh-richest person in the world, has poured more than $1 billion of his fortune into TerraPower, an amount that he expects to increase.
Note that these deals and projects are getting the enthusiastic support of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, Washington governor Jay Inslee, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Virginia senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — all Democrats — plus Republicans like Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin.
And the Biden administration has been, at least in some key ways, an ally to the nuclear-power industry. Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Energy “opened applications for up to $900 million in funding to support the initial domestic deployment of Generation III+ (Gen III+) small modular reactor (SMR) technologies.” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a released statement, “Revitalizing America’s nuclear sector is key to adding more carbon free energy to the grid and meeting the needs of our growing economy — from AI and data centers to manufacturing and healthcare.”
Remember, back in 2020, about two-thirds of the Democratic presidential field opposed the construction of nuclear-power plants, and in some cases wanted to phase out nuclear power entirely. (Among those who wanted it phased out: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson, and MAGA-world’s new favorite former Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard.)
Did you notice the no-nukes green crowd has been a nonfactor in all this so far? When the Philadelphia Inquirer needed an op-ed objecting to the restart of the Three Mile Island plant, it got one from . . . Jane Fonda.
The anti-nuclear-energy movement is effectively dead, and you could argue that the climate-change imperative to reduce carbon emissions killed it off. You’ve heard the term “blue on blue” to refer to friendly fire incidents in the military. This one was “green on green.”
As much as those on the right have reason to cheer these developments, something rankles about how quickly the opposition to nuclear power deteriorated once America’s biggest tech companies weighed in. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google metaphorically called up the federal and state governments and the plant owners, ordered up a McNuke, and the answer was basically, “Sure, would you like fries with that?”
A key lever of power in this country is whatever the big tech companies want. (Apple, Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Amazon.com, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Tesla have been referred to as “the Magnificent Seven.”)
If you want some policy changed, convince the titans of companies like those that it needs to be changed. (Except for Elon Musk; out in California, state officials will bar rocket launches just because they don’t like Musk’s musings on X. I notice it’s once again okay to tell legal immigrants that they shouldn’t weigh in on American politics because they weren’t born here.) And then sit back and watch as the previously insurmountable red tape, inertia, and lack of funding disappear.
Still, my carping aside, the pro-nuclear-energy crowd . . . won the argument.
ADDENDUM: A bit more than three years ago today, Susan Glasser, writing in The New Yorker:
Is Joe Biden’s Presidency actually “dead,” “failed,” and all but “over,” as you have surely heard by now? The Republicans and their conservative allies in the commentariat, including some notable Never Trumpers, think so. Jim Geraghty, in National Review, wrote this week that Biden is both “flailing” and “failing,” and that the President and his Administration are “naïve, unprepared, slow-footed, and in over their heads. . . .”
All of which strikes me as wildly overstated, a conservative analogue to the many progressives who declared Biden the second coming of F.D.R. this spring, merely because he had proposed a wave of expensive progressive legislation that may or may not ever get through Congress. It was too soon then to nominate him to a place on Mount Rushmore; it is too soon now to consign him to the ash heap of history.
Hey, how about that big Biden comeback since then, huh? The president’s job-approval rating never recovered from the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle.